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Harper: Terry Collins adjusts to life with Yoenis Cespedes
- Updated: March 16, 2016

Terry Collins doesn’t like the backwards hat but he lets it slide as long as Yoenis Cespedes continues to produce.
JUPITER, Fla.–They are a baseball odd couple, the old-school manager and the glitzy center fielder with the flashy cars who likes to wear his cap backwards. Suffice it to say there was a time when Terry Collins and Yoenis Cespedes couldn’t have coexisted, at least not peacefully.
But as times have changed, so has Collins. As he has said more than once during his years as manager with the Mets, “You either adapt or get out.”
So he swears by Cespedes, choosing to see the big picture while ignoring the peccadilloes that once would have made him crazy.
“I love the guy,” Collins was saying on the field here Tuesday. “First of all, he works his butt off. And he’s a team guy. He’s having a team barbecue at his ranch on our off-day (Wednesday), and everybody’s going. That’s how he is.”
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Now, obviously Collins is no dummy. He needs Cespedes to produce for the Mets to go anywhere this season; understands how popular the slugger is with the fans; and knows that with a $ 27.5 million salary this season he has a lot of clout.
So it’s not as if the manager can afford to draw a hard line with his star player anyway. Still, Collins admits there was a time when he wouldn’t have handled the Cespedes swag, as Kevin Long calls it, without at least some brushfires, back in his previous stints as manager with the Astros and Angels in the 1990s.
“You learn what’s really important and what’s not,” he said.
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As such this is a wiser, more accommodating Collins, at age 67, who has even bent on his long-standing rule that he considered somewhat sacred: wear the cap frontward, baseball style.
Cespedes, of course, loves to wear his cap backwards before games and during workouts. The manager was tempted to call him on it this spring but decided otherwise.
“That’s his thing,” Collins said. “Even though it’s a minor issue, it’s an issue for him, so I let it go. It’s like when I coached in Pittsburgh and I watched (Jim) Leyland with Bonds.
“Barry wasn’t taking part in the team stretch, so Jim called Barry in and said, ‘Look, I know you don’t stretch, but I need you to be out there with the team.’ So Barry would come out and lie down on the ground. But at least he was there.
“Sometimes you just have to turn your head. Do I like everything? No. But it’s about what happens at 7:05. I’ve learned that.”
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Collins says he concerned himself too much with such matters when he was younger, and believes he’s a better manager now for not obsessing over every little detail.
“You can’t worry about everything,” he said. “And to be honest, when I was young I did that. I thought everything was a reflection on me.
“But when you have all those rules, you’ve gotta police that stuff and it wears you out. All it does is tick the players off anyway. Then when you say something that you really want them to hear, they tune you out because you’re on their ass all the time.”
So now Collins says he picks his spots. He says he was fine with Cespedes’ car show because it was early in camp, and bristles at any notion it created a circus-like atmosphere.
He said Cespedes kept him in the loop, letting him know he would be capping off his week of driving different customized luxury cars to work by getting together with Noah Syndergaard to arrive on horses.
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Cespedes arriving to spring training on a horse was the end of fun time for Collins and it’s been all business since.
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At that point, with games beginning, the manager made a point of saying publicly, “Fun time is over.” Since then he says it has been all business for his ballclub, as well as for Cespedes.
“The message got through,” Collins said. “Have you seen him drive anything but his truck to the ballpark since then? No. He was doing that to mess with some of the media. He said to me, ‘If they’re going to make a big deal out of how I come to the ballpark, I’m going to come in on a horse.’
“From the outside people may have thought it was a circus but it wasn’t. These guys know what Yoenis is about. He lightened things up. But through all of that he was showing up early at the ballpark every day and doing extra running.”
As a result, Collins says there is a mutual respect and open communication between them:
“I talked to him about the center field situation. I told him, ‘I know you’d rather play left, but we need you in center.’ He mentioned that he could win a Gold Glove (in left), but he said he was willing to do what’s best for the team. That’s all I can ask.”
Well, that and 30 home runs, 100 RBI, and Cespedes can wear his hat backwards all he wants. Collins will just look the other way.